The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (37 page)

But when I realized Billa and Clinton Deix were together in some kind of macabre sadistic plot against me, it was almost more difficult to absorb than Glenn’s death. Death is inescapable, pain and cruelty aren’t.

What did they want from me? What could I have done to deserve this kind of extraordinary planning and venomous energy? Scanlon the cop had said he wasn’t surprised at the shit on my walls because of the kind of job I had.
Was
it something I’d done on
Off the Wall
that had so enraged the two of them?

And what was their relationship? Brothers? Lovers? Something even more bizarre? Where was the heart of this angry body? What had I done to make it beat so hard and fast?

My sister and brother-in-law live in Vienna. There is a nine-hour time difference which I forgot completely when I called and got a sleepy “Hello?”

“Hi, Walker? This is Ingram.”

“Hi, Ingram! Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

In the background I heard my sister ask who it was. Their new baby began to cry.

“I have to know something, Walker. It’s really very important. Remember you told me to get in touch with Michael Billa? Remember how you said we’d like each other and should get together?”

“Michael Billa? Oh yes, now I remember.”

“How do you know him, Walker? Where did you meet him?”

The line was quiet except for the long-distance hiss and whisper of nine thousand miles.

“It’s a long story, Ingram. I—”

Whatever else he said was shoved aside by a loud creak in my bedroom.

“Oh shit!” Without thinking, I put the phone down and slowly rose from the chair.

There! Another creak.

The other place I’d lived in LA had been broken into three times. What they took doesn’t matter; it’s that someone has been in your home, looking, picking and choosing, feeling your life, smelling your air. When it’s over, you wash every object and open all the windows.

Walking as quietly as possible to the door, I took my knife out of the vase for the second time in a week. It opened with a frighteningly loud click.

“Get out of my fucking house, Billa! Clinton! Just get out of here!”

They must have come in through the window. I was on the second floor. An easy climb up and over balcony gratings. Maybe knowing I was there ... Maybe shouting at them would—

I turned the bedroom doorknob. As soon as I did, there was a rush of sounds inside, a flurry, a scrambling, something falling. Were they leaving? What if they had a weapon this time? What if they meant business and not just shit on the walls?

“Get out!”

A laugh inside, more stumbling. I took a breath and flung the door open.

All the lights were on. No one was there. The next thing I saw was dark red on white. Blood on my bed. But blood with other things—chunks of things. Globs and pieces ... Meat! Big pieces of raw
meat
had been thrown onto my white bed and the blood from them was splattered everywhere across the white cotton.

“Holy Jesus!”

Thick and glistening red calves’ liver. Bloody, shiny purple cow hearts, soft ivory brains like pudding. Kidneys ...

How many pieces were there? Forty? They covered the bed. There was a gleaming pile of them in the centre.

A door in my mind slammed shut and I wasn’t afraid. It was enough. It was over now. I would make it stop.

At the window I looked down. A very large dark shape was shimmying fast down a drainpipe on the side of the building. I couldn’t make out who it was, but just the size alone, the fatness, said it had to be him.

“I see you, Billa! I see you, asshole!”

He laughed, but not Michael’s normal laugh, deep and long. This was a child’s “hee-hee-hee”. Because of everything else that was going on, it sounded wicked and alarming.

But none of this was
funny;
nothing here had a child’s laugh. It made me angrier.

I went after the son of a bitch. I went down that drainpipe so fast you would have thought I was rappeling off the side of a mountain with ropes and karabiners. Zizzzz—down the pipe, onto the ground, lose my footing, up again on the run.

The shock was how fast
he
ran. He’d touched ground only seconds before me, but already was almost a block ahead and laughing that high awful laugh.

“You bastard!”

Hee-hee-hee.

He was too far away and it was too dark to see him clearly. But, once, he did turn around, still running, and grabbed his crotch in the old “Screw You!” gesture. He fell down. I stopped where I was and tried to laugh. If I couldn’t catch him
(why
couldn’t I? How could
anyone
run that fast?) I could laugh at him, a bad imitation of his stupid kid’s laugh. Hoping it would sting him a moment, wipe the victory off his face for a blink.

But he even rose quickly! On his feet again in seconds and running, laughing the same way.

I was full of the energy of outrage and wasn’t going to give up until there was nothing left inside, or I was flat on the ground and finished.

We ran past warmly lit houses, people getting out of cars, trees that gave up night perfumes—magnolia, honeysuckle.

Not watching when he crossed streets, he ran a zigzag course that meant nothing to me. Was he going somewhere? Or just trying to get away anywhere?

No matter where he was going, it was plain he could have lost me if he wanted. But he ran just slowly enough now for me to be able to keep him in sight. Any moment I expected him to blast off and be gone, like the Road Runner.

When it was all gone and I had to stop, hands on knees, lungs working like bellows, I saw him standing two streets away, waiting. Was he whistling? Someone was.

I wanted to shout at him, but had barely enough energy to catch my breath.

Why did he continue to stand there in the deep shadows, waiting? His laughter rose over the sound of my broken breathing.

I heard a car, something loud and powerful, come up behind me. Paying no attention, I tried to keep my eye on the enemy across the street.

The car stopped nearby. As I turned to look at it, a brilliant beam (a flashlight?) clicked on inside and lashed out across the soft dark towards Billa.

It caught him right in the face.

But it wasn’t Billa. I’d never seen this man before. “Ingram! Get in fast!”

My eyes, burnt by the light’s glare, took a while to clearly see who was calling from inside the car.

Michael Billa behind the wheel. Clinton sitting next to him, the light in his hand still trained on the Meat Man. “Hurry up! Get in or we’ll never catch him!”

I looked across the street. Meat Man was gone.

“Get the fuck in the car! We can still catch up with him!”

“Catch
who
? What the hell is this?”

“Forget it. He’s gone,” Michael said from inside.

“Fucking A! Will you
get
in the goddamned car, York? You messed everything else up. You think you just might be able to put your ass down in here without doing more wrong? Huh?”

Clinton threw open his door, which banged into my leg. I reached in and hauled the little shit up face to face, then slammed him back against the roof of the car. He cried out, struggled to pull away.

“Nothing doing, Clinton. Not till I hear what’s going on.”

Michael grabbed me from behind. Old Tae Kwon Do lessons finally came in handy—I brought my heel down on the top of his foot without letting go of Deix. Billa yelled and fell with a fat thud beside me.

I slammed Clinton against the car again for no reason other than it felt great to hit
someone
after all the shit I’d been through. No matter if it was their shit or Meat Man’s, everyone but me seemed to know what was going on. Now it was time to find out and be part of the club.

Deix kneed me in the crotch.

All my breath went out in a whoosh and I bent way over to hold myself; to keep whatever was left inside inside.

“Nobody does that to me, fucker!”

“Clinton, don’t!” Billa’s voice.

“Fuck him! Nobody gets away with that!”

Something hard stuck in my neck. Even through the pain, I knew it was a gun. The hammer cocked back.

Billa screamed. “Remember Fanelli! Clinton, Fanelli!”

“Shit.” The sound of the hammer being clicked back down. He kicked me again but hit my thigh.

Such pain I could barely stand. When I could open my eyes again, I saw Billa on his knees in front of me. So fat on his hands and knees.

After a few deep breaths I could finally say, “What is this, Michael? What’s going on? Who are you?”

He dropped his head, shook it.

Clinton was the one who said “
You,
asshole. Me and him both. Together. We’re all you. You’re us.”

I wasn’t about to go back to my apartment, so we went to Michael’s. I sat in the back seat of his car and watched the back of their heads. No one said anything.

Once there, Michael gave us beer and then got out a high school yearbook which he brought to me on the couch.

“This is Clinton. Me. And that’s Anthony Fanelli.”

Typical pictures. Typical faces of American high school kids in the 1960s. The only difference was Clinton Deix looked the same in his picture then as he did today.

“I don’t want to see pictures of Anthony Fanelli! I want to know what’s going on! Why are you two suddenly friends? Michael, you told me Clinton was here to get me.” I looked at Deix. “And
you
said Michael ‘froze’ you, and wanted me to kill you!”

They looked at each other. Clinton spoke. “Mike thought that was true. But what I said was a lie, because I couldn’t tell you the truth till someone else of us understood.”

“Understood
what
?”

“Look at your palm.”

I held out my hand and turned it over. I’d had my palm read so many times on
Off the Wall
that I pretty well knew every crack and line and what they were supposed to signify. Nothing had changed there since I’d last looked.

“Yes? So?”

Both Michael and Clinton came up to me and, turning over their hands, put them down on either side of mine. The three palms were absolutely identical.

“No!”

“You can look at them with a magnifying glass and you’ll see everything’s the same. That’s what Mike did when I showed him.”

I looked at Clinton. “What does it mean?”

Billa answered. “I just found out myself, Ingram. All these years, I thought Clinton had just somehow frozen at fifteen years old. Don’t ask me how. Who knows what secrets life has?

“But ever since you and I met, I’ve been feeling stranger and stranger. Then Clinton showed up again as he has been, on and off, for years.

“I was in the shower when it came to me—” He snapped his fingers “—like
that.
Holding this bar of yellow soap, I looked at my hand, then at my toes, and wondered idly why we have
five
fingers and five toes—not more, or less. All the scientists in the world will give you logical explanations for it, but none of them are right.

“Know why? Because God’s giving us the biggest hint of all! The whole truth hit me there in the shower. And when it did, I walked right out, dried myself off and went looking for Clinton to ask if I was right.

“Why
does
man feel so lost or unhappy? Even when we’re relatively well-off and comfortable? Philosophers have been asking those questions about life and existence throughout history.

“Wanna know why, Ingram? Wanna know one of the answers to the universe?” He smiled a little sadly and held up his hand. Showing me his familiar palm, he pointed at it.

“We have five fingers and toes because God is telling us
everything
comes in fives, even complete souls. Why does the majority of mankind feel unfulfilled in their lives? Because they’re not whole. But not in the way people like Plato were talking about. All that ‘Hermaphroditic Whole’ stuff isn’t it. It’s a lot simpler than that.

“Think of people as numbers. Some are ones, twos ... But the mistake everyone makes is to think there is only
one
number one, or
one
nine hundred and sixty-two. Most societies teach us we’re all individuals, if only biologically. For better or worse, there’s no one else like us on the face of the earth.”

“Or ever has been!” Clinton said, shaking his head.

“Right, or ever has been. But here’s the truth, Ingram, and it’s why our palms are the same. There are only so many numbers. Let’s say a thousand, for convenience sake.

“God makes different people, sure, but each of them has a certain number. For as long as man’s been on earth, these numbers have remained the same. One to a thousand. But at any one time, there are quite a few ones, quite a few twos ...

“A complete soul, a complete number seventeen, for example, is separated by God into five parts. Each has its own important function, like the five fingers on a hand. But a hand without all its fingers is incomplete. The same is true with the soul.

“We feel lost or depressed so often in life because we go around as only one-fifth of a complete soul, floating around alone out in the world.

“The only way to be at peace is to find four other ‘Us’s, four other number seventeens, and come together. That’s why God gave us that many fingers and toes. He wanted us to see them a hundred times a day to remind us of this.”

Michael sat back and let Clinton take over.

“The other day me and Mike figured out why I froze like this. Because you freeze as soon as you understand this five-part thing. I was in Florida when it came to me, but at the time I just thought it was some dumb-ass science fiction idea and didn’t pay any attention to it. But it’s the truth.

“You freeze the minute you understand, and don’t unfreeze till you can get four others together who’re the same as you to make it whole again. So since it came to Mike now, that means he’ll stay frozen till we can get the others with us. You too, Ingram. Both of you’ll stay like you are till the five of us’re joined. Me, I stayed a teen. At least you guys got to get older!”

“But you’re
telling
me this. I didn’t come to any of it myself, even if I did believe you.”